Tidbits

Characterization

I don't like how this one turned out. It feels mean-spirited - though the judgmental-ness is intentional, I still don't really like it. Anyway, the prompt for this was to use setting to imply something about a character, without actually having the character do anything in the scene. This is kind of a loose interpretation of that.

We saw it in this obscure, mostly-residential area of San Francisco. We were looking for this crepe place we saw on one of those artfully-filmed food videos on Facebook. It was where the edges of Chinatown gradually blurred into a bootleg-goods-store here, a "massage parlor" there, interspersed with other buildings, gradually reducing in frequency until you can climb an entire hill and see nothing but Victorian houses. There, the traffic isn't so thick and the crowds are sparse and if it weren't for the hills and the wind, you could be in any other city. Then you turn the corner and you see this flamboyant pink square building that looked like it got sent on a time machine from the 80s. It's called Out of the Closet and it's a clothing store that donates its profits to AIDS patients, and you're like, "Oh, I'm still in San Francisco after all."

If we'd been anywhere else in the city I wouldn't have blinked when we saw the girl laying still on road-facing side of the parking meter she was clinging to. On Fisherman's wharf she'd have been any napping homeless person. Something about her being the only homeless person in the line of sight made her sympathetic. I stopped short, so Dana did, too. "What?" she asked.

My eyes fixed on the woman. "That just seems dangerous." What if she rolled over into the road?

"I guess," Dana said.

I approached the woman. If she woke up I would give her a quarter or the rest of the yogurt-ish beverage I'd bought in Chinatown and hated. But she didn't wake up, and I didn't see any change cup on her person. I looked her over. She was using a duct-taped piece of cardboard as a blanket. If there was anything written on it, it was on the side I couldn't see. She didn't have a shopping cart with her or a stroller or anything that homeless people use to carry things around in other towns. She did have a backpack with a busted zipper. Crushed plastic bottles were poking out from where the zipper should have closed it. A needle was poking out of the backpack fabric.

"What are you doing, Reagan?" Dana snapped.

"I just... what if she's hurt?" I say.

"She's just sleeping. Let's go."

"She could GET hurt."

"I'm sure she knows what she's doing. You're being weird."

But there was something weird about how stiff her fingers were on the base of the parking meter. Who slept like that?

I step back and lower my voice. "Is she even alive?"

"God, Reagan! Who cares?"

Dana realizes how she sounds when she sees the horror in my face. "I didn't mean it like that," she backpedals. "I just mean, yeah, duh, she's alive!"

Some lesbians emerge from the gay clothing store then. One of them is dressed fashionably and has her head half-shaved like Natalie Dormer. They all walk past us, laughing, not paying the homeless person a bit of mind. Something about that makes me feel like, duh, of course there's nothing wrong here, we're in San Francisco and we're supposed to see stuff like this. You just ignore it. So I shrug, and Dana and I leave, and we find our crepe place.

But that feeling about something being off stayed with me, so I liked the SFPD page on Facebook and I looked at the news for a while. It didn't bring me any peace of mind that I never saw anything about that woman either way. A homeless woman dead in San Francisco would never make it to the headlines.